Network reporting

July 18, 2019

Contributed by:
C

You can optimize resource usage by monitoring your network reporting on Citrix Application Delivery Management (Citrix ADM). You may have a distributed deployment with many applications deployed at multiple locations. To ensure optimal performance of your applications, you have also deployed multiple Citrix Application Delivery Controller (Citrix ADC) instances to load balance, content switch, or compress the traffic. Network performance can impact the application performance. To continue to maintain performance of your applications, you must regularly monitor your network performance and make sure all resources are used optimally.

Citrix ADM now allows you to generate reports not only for instances at a global level but also for entities such as the virtual servers and network interfaces. The instance family comprises both Citrix ADC and SD-WAN instances. The virtual servers for which you can generate reports are as follows:

Load balancing servers

Content switching servers

Cache redirection

Global service load balancing (GSLB)

Authentication

Citrix Gateway

The network reporting dashboard in Citrix ADM is a highly customizable. You can now create multiple dashboards for various instances, virtual servers, and other entities.

Network reporting dashboard

The following image calls out the various features in the dashboard:

The left side panel lists all the custom dashboards that are created in Citrix ADM. You can click on one of them to view the various reports that the dashboard is composed of. For example, a TCP and SSL dashboard contains various reports related to TCP and SSL protocols.

You can customize each dashboard with multiple widgets to display a variety of reports. A widget represents a report on the dashboard, that is a collection of more related reports. For example, a compression TCP Bytes Usage report contains reports for compressed TCP bytes transferred and received per second.

You can display reports for one hour, one day, one week, or for one month. In addition, you can now use the timeline slider option to customize the duration of reports being generated on the Citrix ADM.

You can remove a report by clicking “X”. You can also export the report as a .pdf, .jpeg, .png, or .csv format to your system. You can also schedule a time and recurrence of when the report should be generated. You can also configure an email distribution list to which the reports should be sent.

The Instances section at the top of the dashboard lists the IP addresses of all the instances for which the report is generated.

You can either remove instances by clicking “X” or add more instances to the reports. But, currently Citrix ADM allows you to view reports for ten instances.

You can also export the entire dashboard as a .pdf, .jpeg, .png, or .csv format to your system. Any changes made to the dashboard must be saved. Click Save to save the changes.

The following section explains in detail the tasks to create a dashboard, generate reports, and to export reports.

To view or to create a dashboard:

In Citrix ADM, navigate to Networks > Network Reporting.

To view the existing dashboards, click View Dashboard. The Network Reporting Dashboard page opens where you can view all your dashboards and report widgets.

Type. Select the entity type for which you want to generate reports. In this example, select load balancing virtual servers.

Description. Type a meaningful description for the dashboard.

Click Next.

In the Select Reports tab, select the reports required. In this example, you can select transactions, connections, and throughput. Click Next.

In the Select Entities tab, click Add.

In the Choose LB Virtual Servers window that slides in, select any number of virtual servers that you want to monitor.

Note

Depending on the entity type that you have selected in Basic Settings tab, the Entities tab is populated with corresponding entities. For example, if you select global, you can add instances.

Click Create.

The Skype for Business dashboard is created and displays all the reports that you have selected.

Note

Currently, any changes that you make to legends or filters cannot be saved.

Exporting network reports

While you can export widget reports in .pdf, .png, .jpeg, or .csv formats, you can export the entire dashboards in only .pdf, .jpeg, or .png formats.

Note

You cannot export reports in Citrix ADM if you have read-only permissions. You need an edit permission to be able to create a file in Citrix ADM and to be able to export the file.

To export dashboard reports:

Navigate to Networks > Network Reporting

Click View Dashboards to view all the dashboards that you have created.

In the left pane, click a dashboard. In this example, click Dashboard 1.

Click the export button at the top right corner of the page.

Under the Export Now tab, select the required format, and then click Export.

On the Export page, you can do one of the following:

Select Export Now tab. To view and save the report in PDF, JPEG, PNG, or CSV format.

Select Schedule Export tab. To schedule the report daily, weekly, or monthly and send the report over email or slack message.

You can schedule an export of the Network Reporting dashboard page on a recurrent basis. For example, you can set an option to generate a dashboard report every week for the previous one hour at a particular time. The report is generated every week then and shows the status of the dashboard. The report overrides the time and date stamp, if set by the user.

Note

if you select Weekly recurrence, ensure that you select the weekdays on which you want the report to be scheduled.

If you select Monthly recurrence, ensure that you enter all the days that you want the report to be scheduled separated by commas.

While scheduling network reports, you can customize the heading of the report by entering a text string in the Subject field. The report created at the scheduled time will have this string as its name.

For example, for network reports originating from a particular virtual server, you can type in the subject as “authentication-reports-10.106.118.120,” where 10.106.118.120 is the IP address of the monitored virtual server.

Note

Currently, this option is available only when you schedule the export of reports. You cannot add a heading to the report when you export them instantly.

To export widget reports:

Navigate to Networks > Network Reporting.

Click View Dashboards to view all the dashboards that you have created.

In the left pane, click a dashboard. In this example also click Skype for Business.

Under the Export Now tab, select the required format, and then click Export.

How to manage Thresholds for Network Reports on Citrix ADM

To monitor the state of a Citrix ADC instance, you can set thresholds on counters and receive notifications when a threshold is exceeded. On Citrix ADM, you can configure thresholds and view, edit, and delete them.

For example, you can receive an email notification when the Connections counter for a content switching virtual server reaches a specified value. You can define a threshold for a specific instance type. You can also choose the reports you want to generate for specific counter metrics from your chosen instance.

When the value of a counter exceeds or falls below (as specified by the rule) the threshold value, an event of the specified severity is generated to signify a performance related issue. When the counter value returns to a value that you consider normal, the event is cleared. These events can be viewed by navigating to Networks > Events > Reports. On the Reports page, you can click the Events by Severity donut to view events by their severity.

You can also associate an action with a threshold such as sending an email or SMS message when the threshold is breached.

Report Name. Name of the performance report that provides information about this threshold.

You can also set rules to specify when an event is to be generated or cleared. You can specify the following details under the Configure Rule section:

Metric. Select the metric for which you want to set a threshold.

Comparator. Select a comparator to check whether the monitored value is greater than or equal to or less than or equal to the threshold value.

Threshold Value. Type the value for which the event severity is calculated. For example, you might want to generate an event with critical event severity if the monitored value for Current Client Connections reaches 80 percent. In this case, type 80 as the threshold value. You can view “critical severity” events by navigating to Networks > Events > Reports. On the Reports page, you can click the Events by Severity donut to view events by their severity.

Clear Value. Type the value that indicates when to clear the value. For example, you might want to clear the Current Client Connections threshold when the monitored value reaches 50 percent. In this case, type 50 as the clear value.

Event Severity. Select the security level that you want to set for the threshold value.

Choose the IP address of the instance or instances for which you want set the threshold.

You can additionally add an Event Message. Type a message that you want to appear when the threshold is reached. Citrix ADM appends the monitored value and the threshold value to this message.

Select Enable to enable the threshold to generate alarms.

Optionally, you can configure Actions such as email and/or Slack notifications.

Click Create.

Set Performance Polling Interval for Network Reports

By default, every 5 minutes, NITRO calls collect performance data for network reporting. This retrieves instance statistics such as counter information and aggregates them on the basis of per minute, per hour, per day, or per week. You can view this aggregated data in predefined reports.

To set the performance polling interval, navigate to Networks > Network Reporting and click Configure Polling Interval. Your polling interval cannot be less than 5 minutes or more than 60 minutes.

Configuring Network Reporting Prune Settings

You can configure the purge interval of network reporting data in Citrix ADM. This limits the amount of network reporting data being stored in the Citrix ADM server’s database. By default, pruning happens every 24 hours (at 01.00 hours) for the network reporting historical data.

Note

The value that you can specify cannot exceed 90 days or be less than 1 day.

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